This document contains the hardware compatability notes
for FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE on the i386 hardware platform (also
referred to as FreeBSD/i386 4.8-RELEASE). It lists devices
known to work on this platform, as well as some notes on
boot-time kernel customization that may be useful when
attempting to configure support for new devices.

Note: This document includes information
specific to the i386 hardware platform. Versions of the
hardware compatability notes for other architectures
will differ in some details.

FreeBSD/i386 runs on a wide variety of ``IBM PC
compatible'' machines. Due to the wide range of hardware
available for this architecture, it is impossible to
exhaustively list all combinations of equipment supported
by FreeBSD. Nevertheless, some general guidelines are
presented here.

Almost all i386-compatible processors are supported. All
Intel processors beginning with the 80386 are supported,
including the 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium
II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, and variants thereof, such as
the Xeon and Celeron processors. (While technically
supported, the use of the 80386SX is specifically not
recommended.) All i386-compatible AMD processors are also
supported, including the Am486, Am5x86, K5, K6 (and
variants), Athlon (including Athlon-MP, Athlon-XP,
Athlon-4, and Athlon Thunderbird), and Duron processors.
The AMD Élan SC520 embedded processor is supported.
The Transmeta Crusoe is recognized and supported, as are
i386-compatible processors from Cyrix and NexGen.

There is a wide variety of motherboards available for
this architecture. Motherboards using the ISA, VLB, EISA,
AGP, and PCI expansion busses are well-supported. There is
some limited support for the MCA (``MicroChannel'')
expansion bus used in the IBM PS/2 line of PCs.

Symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems are generally
supported by FreeBSD, although in some cases, BIOS or
motherboard bugs may generate some problems. Perusal of the
archives of the FreeBSD symmetric multiprocessing mailing
list <freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.org>
may yield some clues.

FreeBSD will generally run on i386-based laptops, albeit
with varying levels of support for certain hardware
features such as sound, graphics, power management, and
PCCARD expansion slots. These features tend to vary in
idiosyncratic ways between machines, and frequently require
special-case support in FreeBSD to work around hardware
bugs or other oddities. When in doubt, a search of the
archives of the FreeBSD laptop computer mailing list <freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.org>
may be useful.

This section describes the devices currently known to be
supported by with FreeBSD on the i386 platform. Other
configurations may also work, but simply have not been
tested yet. Feedback, updates, and corrections to this list
are encouraged.

Where possible, the drivers applicable to each device or
class of devices is listed. If the driver in question has a
manual page in the FreeBSD base distribution (most should),
it is referenced here.

With all supported SCSI controllers, full support is
provided for SCSI-I, SCSI-II, and SCSI-III peripherals,
including hard disks, optical disks, tape drives
(including DAT, 8mm Exabyte, Mammoth, and DLT), medium
changers, processor target devices and CD-ROM drives.
WORM devices that support CD-ROM commands are supported
for read-only access by the CD-ROM drivers (such as cd(4)).
WORM/CD-R/CD-RW writing support is provided by cdrecord(1),
which is a part of the sysutils/cdrtools port in
the Ports Collection.

A range of USB peripherals are supported; devices
known to work are listed in this section. Owing to the
generic nature of most USB devices, with some exceptions
any device of a given class will be supported, even if
not explicitly listed here.